‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Open Them’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|